The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,78

sight. “Get away from me.”

“Oh, shush.” Daji rolled her eyes as she continued scrubbing grime from Rin’s cheeks. The washcloth had turned rust brown from dried blood. “I’ve just saved your life.”

“I’m not going . . .” Rin struggled to make sense of her thoughts, trying to remember why she was afraid. “The mountain. The mountain. I’m not going—”

“Eat.” Daji pressed a hard, stale bun into her hand. “You need your strength. You won’t survive immurement otherwise.”

Rin stared helplessly at her. She didn’t lift the bun; her fingers hardly had the strength to close around it. “Why are you doing this?”

“I am saving us both,” Daji said. “Maybe your incipient southern empire, too, if you’ll stop with the hysterics and listen.”

“The army—”

“Your army has abandoned you. Your loyal officers are in no position to help. You’ve been ousted by the Southern Coalition, and you can’t call the fire.” Daji smoothed Rin’s hair back behind her ears. “I am guaranteeing us safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh.”

“But why—”

“Because my strength now is not enough. We need an ally. A mutual friend, who to the best of my knowledge is currently whiling away eternity in a mountain.”

Rin blinked. She understood Daji’s words, but she didn’t understand what she meant; it took a moment of thoughts churning sluggishly through her mind before the pieces fell together.

Then she balked.

She hadn’t thought about Jiang for nearly a year. She hadn’t let herself; the memories hurt too much. He’d been not just her teacher but her master. She’d trusted him; he’d promised to keep her safe. And then, the moment her world descended into war, he’d simply abandoned her. He’d left her to seal himself in a fucking rock.

“He won’t come out,” Rin said hoarsely. “He’s too scared.”

Daji’s lip curled. “Is that what you think?”

“He wants to hide. He won’t leave. He’s—there’s something wrong—”

“His Seal is eroding,” Daji said fiercely. Her good eye glimmered. “I know. I’ve felt it, too. He’s getting stronger—he’s coming back to himself. I didn’t know what I was doing when I Sealed the three of us, but I’d always suspected—hoped—I hadn’t done it right. And I didn’t. The Seal was a broken, imperfect thing, and now it’s fading. Now I—we—get a second chance.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rin shook her head weakly. “He won’t leave.”

“Oh, he’ll have to.” Daji resumed dabbing at Rin’s temples. “I need him.”

“But I needed him,” Rin said. She felt a sharp pang in her chest, a wrenching mix of frustration and despair that until now she’d been so good at suppressing. She wanted to kick something; she wanted to cry. How, after so much time, could old hurts sting so sharp?

“Perhaps you did.” Daji gave Rin a pitying look. “But Ziya’s not your anchor. He’s mine.”

The rest of the journey could have taken minutes or hours. Rin didn’t know; she passed it in a painful daze, slipping in and out of consciousness as her body ached from its myriad contusions. Daji lapsed into silence, cautious of eavesdroppers. At last the engine roar slowed to a whine, then stopped. Rin jolted fully awake as the carriage thudded against the ground at an angle and screeched as it dragged several feet to a halt. Then Republican soldiers came into her compartment, loaded her bound form onto a wooden stretcher, and carried her out into the icy mountain air.

She didn’t resist. Daji wanted her to play helpless.

She knew they had reached Snake Province. She recognized the shape of these mountains; she’d traveled this way before. But some part of her mind could not accept that they were really, truly, in the Kukhonin Mountains.

Less than a day had passed since Souji betrayed her in Tikany. They’d crossed half the country in the time since. But that couldn’t be right—this journey should have taken weeks. Rin had seen dirigibles fly, she knew how fast they moved, but this was absurd. This took her ingrained conceptions of time, space, and distance, and ripped them to shreds.

Was this how the Hesperians regularly traveled? She tried to imagine spatiality from their perspective. What would society be like if one could traverse the continent in mere days? If she could wake up one morning in Sinegard, and go to bed in Arlong that evening?

No wonder they acted as if they owned the world. To them it must seem so small.

“Which way?” asked a soldier.

“Up,” Daji said. “The entrance lies near the summit. There won’t be space up there to land a craft. We’ll have to climb.”

Rin was strapped